I mean either don’t do it or make porn. There shouldn’t be a in between.
Right? Having two actors awkwardly on top of one another moaning is just weird. Having them in bed in the afterglow, talking, could be potentially plot relevant.
Also it’s always fucking straight people. People go around all “don’t shove your gayness down my throat” as though we don’t get heterosexuality shoved down our throats on a daily basis.
The show Sex Education does a pretty good job of showing the different types of sex that can happen between all different kinds of relationships. If you’re looking for that kind of representation, that show has it.
It’s also a really good show regardless.
Same for people who drive cars in movies. Like, who goes to the supermarket with his car?
Either do a Formula 1 movie or don’t.
I’m not saying every sex scene is good but, the puritan undertone of the US really comes out in these conversations. The idea that a sex scene adds nothing to the experience is simply wrong. I mean, you could say the same for fight scenes, cinematic landscape scenes, most scenes without speaking. These all clearly change and often improve the experience of watching, and so does a sex scene. It can say a lot about the state of the characters minds and it provides you significantly more emotional sympathetic impact.
I like seeing two beautiful people going at it. Kinda disappointed in some cases where they blue ball the viewers.
If I want to watch porn I’ll just watch porn. I don’t need it in a movie personally.
I agree. If I wanted to watch porn, then that’s what I’d watch. Just do a nice fade to back and skip the sex scene. It would be even better if they also skip the romance subplot as well. Hollywood needs to learn that it’s possible for two people of the opposite sex to interact with each other without having to fall in love and/or have sex.
So I’ll mention this first as it feels fairly relevant, but the article talks about how successful Game of Thrones was, though I’m not sure I’d attribute that success to the fact it had sex scenes.
As it is, Game of Thrones is a fantasy with lots of dramatic elements to it, and seemingly good writing for the most part, until whatever happened towards the end that ruined that for a lot of people. If they wanted sex to be part of the story, they could do so without ever really showing it on screen, but still being significant and more than just mentioned to have happened.
It could be implied through another character who found some indication of it after, or if no signs of it could be found, through the characters involved themselves, but just before or after it was done. And by doing that, you get the information of how the characters feel about it by how they react and respond, without just blatantly having all the complications of a sex scene included.
To me, showing a sex scene feels like the opposite of the phrase “show, don’t tell”, despite it quite literally being showing. It’s just showing that it happened, almost like it’s “telling” us directly that it did, rather than “showing” that it happened through interactions with the characters or environment before or after, which opens up so many more story and writing opportunities than just “telling” us it happened by just showing the sex that looks mostly like every other sex that has ever happened.
And the times a direct sex scene is actually good for the writing and story? Not everyone might understand what’s being communicated with the sex scene, either because they’d rather not see sex in the first place, or because the body language and other tells are more subtle than what you can accomplish without sex in the first place.
So back to my original mentioned point, the success of Game of Thrones really doesn’t seem like it entirely hinges upon the fact you see characters having sex lots of times, but rather mostly the writing, with which the sex scenes can be rendered unnecessary to convey the same story, without excluding parts of the audience that don’t want to see sex in their fantasy drama for whatever reasons they might have, of which there’s many possible reasons.
And all that without even getting into the problem of genuinely bad sex scenes that either don’t contribute anything at all to the plot or development of characters, or even pointlessly harm the actual plot and development just by being there.
And of course, something else the article talks about that I agree with, you don’t have to have characters immediately jump to having sex from the moment they start liking each other, you can have emotional or platonic bonds that form without that, and without which it just feels significantly more meaningless. Sex isn’t some central point from which all relationships universally revolve around, and you can have characters enjoying time with each other, including in a bed together, without it consistently becoming yet another sexual moment mostly in an attempt to appeal to the viewers rather than the actual characters themselves.